


The Beekeeper's Son

by starkraving



Category: Blade Runner (Movies), Blade Runner 2049
Genre: F/M, K is pretty dangerous, M/M, Multi, and got to have a pretty nice life for a while, and then of course, are much more dangerous, au where K lived, but the runners they send after him, they fucking send blade runners after him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2019-01-29 22:00:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12640032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Two years later, the LAPD catches up with Officer KD6-3.7. The next generation of blade runner is a lot like him. But, you know, also not.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yo warnings upfront. This is an extremely violent story about bio-engineered bounty hunters with superiority complexes taking it out on a target, essentially. Non-con happens.

The blade runners arrive in a black armored spinner.

It comes straight down out of the over-cast skies, humming like a great insect as it circles the roof of the building. It’s a municipal library laid open along it’s flank by post-Black Out C-beams which sheared it open like a knife cuts the skin off a protein cube. The spinner headlights cut through the dust, throwing the ribs of the building into relief.

There’s a roof garden. Hanging pots heavy with greenery strung up from old stone gables that line a central pavilion. Synthetic crops of course, planted in nitrate-soaked nutrient beds. There are rice paddies in the fountain channels, a make-shift greenhouse built from solar-sheeting. A parked spinner is sitting on the west-side of the roof and it’s there that the black armored spinner makes its landing, parking directly between the garden and the vehicle.

It’s quiet.

Then three replicants in black tactical gear and wool over-coats step out of the spinner.

“Wow,” says one of them, a woman with black hair and dark skin. Her eyes shine with wonder. “It smells nice up here.”

“Because there are flowers,” says the man on her left. He’s got his hands in his pockets. His eyes are blue and his hair thick, dark, and pulled back off his forehead. He points. “See, M? Synthetic, but they still produce a form of glucose. Nature hardly knows the difference.

“He’s still just sitting there,” says the third blade-runner, a blond man, features so sharp they look engineered. “Why isn’t he running, L?”

“I dunno, Z,” says the man called ‘L’. “Let’s ask him.

The three manufactured murderers make their way through the hanging garden, along the gables, to the central fountain. The water bubbles gently from a central spout, long since broken open to a raw pipe, water pooling in a stone bowl at the base. A previous generation might have called it a birdbath. This generation has never seen a bird in the flesh, so they wouldn’t. Around this fountain are three stacks of blue boxes set on cinder blocks. The air buzzes around the boxes, the roof top filled with the lazy noise of insects coming and going. In the middle of this: a young man in work-boots, jeans, and a worn blue sweater. His hair is cropped close to his skull, the color of wet sand, and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows.

He’s kneeling by one of the hives.

He’s got the top open, like you pop the lid off a shoebox and he is inspecting the inside. There are bees crawling on his clothes, on his forearms and hands, but it doesn’t seem to trouble him. LD7-1.1, MD7-1.1, and ZD7-1.1 all watch him for a moment, but he doesn’t seem to notice them. There’s a metal canister in his hand that smokes gently from a funnel at the top. It’s clear he knows they are there, but he just keeps working.

Eventually, LD7-1.1 steps forward, his hands still in his jacket pockets.

“We thought you’d run.”

The KD6 model doesn’t look up from what he’s doing. He pauses, briefly, while ‘L’ is talking but he doesn’t make a move to greet them. Instead, he pumps the small latch at the top of the canister. When he does, a concentrated puff of the smoke jets across the top of the box like a smoker’s breath. L, fascinated, makes no move to interrupt him. Officer K sets the tool aside and removes a hooked knife from his belt. He flips it in his hand, fast, inhuman smooth.

There are ten thin wood slats across the top of the box.

Officer K uses the hooked part of the knife to catch the underside of one slat, hooking the lip of the wood and levering it so the slat comes up – revealing a full frame caked in interlocked little cells of waxy almost organic looking masses. The frames are heavy with sluggish insects, the honey bees buzzing and crawling lazily, taking off with drunk stupor as their keeper gently brushes them away with his bare hand, bending his head to blow on them, knocking them loose from their place until the frame is clean of insects.

He finally turns, holding the frame at the edges. For a second, he looks directly at L.

“Excuse me,” their target says.

His voice is low, calm.

The assassin head tilts. He smiles a little – seemingly enthralled by the process, the insects, and their keeper.

L tilts his head the other way, like a new angle will make a difference. “What’s the smoke do?” he asks.

“Calms the swarm,” says the beekeeper. “I need to store this.”

He moves past all three of them to lie the frame down inside an empty plastic tub. They don’t touch him, M and Z following L’s lead and they, like him, watch their target kneel and store the little wood frame. He covers the tub with a towel, turns, and walks back to the hive. He palms the knife-hook again and pries another frame from the honey super. He does with this frame exactly what he did with the first. He inspects it closely, eyes searching the mass of creatures on the honeycomb for some invisible variable known only to him. He lowers his head again, blows the bees away. It’s… oddly intimate watching him do it and without looking, all three know individually that the other two are thinking something similar.

K brushes the frame clean with his fingers. He shakes his head to dislodge a few lazy insects from his hair. Then he turns around.

This time, as he passes, L catches his arm at the bicep. Not hard, just to stop him.

K looks L in the eyes, waiting.

“Don’t they sting you?” L asks.

“Sure,” K says. “It just doesn’t hurt.”

L smiles, tightening his grip on K’s arm. K doesn’t react.

“That didn’t seem strange to you? That synthetic creatures would attack their keepers?”

“No,” K says. “Not after being left too long without maintenance. Their self-defense parameters are likely too broad now.”

L’s smile widens, his pale eyes searching K’s non-expression. “Yeah… you would think that seems normal, wouldn’t you?”

K says nothing.

For a moment, L starts to flex his arm as though to pull K toward him… but he stops. His fingers open. L inclines his head, indicating that K go back to what he was doing and the other two blade runners step back to let the KD6 pass. They watch K pull ten frames from the top compartment of the hive. Then he closes the hive back up, sets the smoker aside and switches it off. He puts the hook knife back on his belt and picks up the tub of capped frames. He puts it on his hip, under his arm, and looks over his shoulder at the three of them.

“I’m going to extract this,” he says, “in my apartment. You can come if you want.”

“Yeah?” L says, captivated. “Why would we do that?”

K’s expression remains empty. “So you can try some of it,” he says. “I changed the feed solution this time.”

L moves toward K, slowly, _lazily_ , as if waiting to see if the older-gen will finally flinch but the former blade runner does no such thing. He just stares at him, monitoring his movements, making no move even when L leans a little too close to his face, near enough their noses almost touch, close enough L can pick out the bio-organic texture in the iris of K’s blue-green stare. This close, L can smell the smoke in his hair and clothes. See the fine imperfections in his skin. He puts on hand on K’s hip. K doesn’t move. He smiles wider… and takes the hooked knife tool from K’s belt. He steps back again.

“That sounds nice,” L says, pocketing the knife. “Thank you. Guys, doesn’t that sound nice?”

Z and M exchange a look.

“Sure,” says M.

Z shrugs. “Whatever.”

K leads all three of the blade runners to an elevator. He keys in a code, hits a button, and calls the lift. When it arrives, L gets in first and leans back against the wall, bracing his arms on the rusted handrail. Z and M stare at K until he gets in and faces forward. Then they enter the elevator on either side of him so he’s surrounded. If, again, this troubles Officer K… he gives no sign. He just hits the button for floor three and the door rattles shut. The lift is slow, powered by feeble solar reserves.

As they wait for it to crawl downward, listening passively to the groan of ancient machinery, L takes one step forward from the back of the lift. When he does this, it leaves him standing directly at K’s back. His boots inches from K’s heels, so close he’s almost touching him. K’s eyes flicker left, like he wants to look over his shoulder, but he does not move. M and Z pretend not to see. L leans forward a little, his nose and mouth ghosting near his shoulder. His eyes are on the side of K’s face, watching the lines of his jaw for tension, for a sign he’s going to look. When he doesn’t, L closes his eyes and inhales something from the fabric of his shirt. Then he moves to nape of K’s neck, leaning so close his breath is warm against skin.

On a whim, he blows gently on his neck, like K did to remove the bees from the hive.

This time, K’s spine tightens, his grip on the lip of the plastic tub clenching fractionally.

L smiles.

“K,” he murmurs, “are you nervous?”

“A little,” he says. “I’m worried this batch won’t turn out.”

L laughs. “Right. Of course.”

Then he moves his hands. He places them at K’s biceps. He uses the hold to keep K still as he leans in over his shoulder to whisper, “You know we’re here to take you with us, right?” When he gets no answer, L presses his lips against the shell of K’s ear, words vibrating warm into the complex coil of the cochlear nerve. “You’re still going to be a good host, right, brother?” He’s leaning up against the back of K’s body now. “We did come a long way to find you.”

K doesn’t react. He just stares forward.

“Sure thing,” he says.

The elevator dings and the doors open at the third floor.

K steps out of the elevator into a beautiful hallway. The walls are deep red brick, the hall lights a series of warm yellow ceiling lamps. There are faux-wood park benches clearly taken from outside now lined up along the walls. On them: stacks of physical books piled high. There are about four-dozen wind-chimes in various states of disrepair and style nailed to the ceiling. There are sections of the brick that are over-run with white chalk writing – Japanese mostly, a little English, a lot of math equations. The chimes near the vents ping gently as the four replicants pass, following K in a small tight formation.

K comes to a door at the very end of the hall. He unlocks it with a finger-touch, pushing his shoulder against it.

The apartment is bigger than your average city flat, but not much bigger. The floors are faux wood panels and tile. The walls lined in shelves, absolutely jammed full of books and brick-brack, work boots lined up by the door. The foyer gives way immediately into a wider living space – a couch on one side, a low coffee table messy with an electronics project and a forgotten coffee mug. There’s a bed against the wall. A single mattress. Unmade, clothes rumpled on the comforter. An old-world juke box by the window.

“Don’t track in dirt,” K says.

The trio of killers pause, temporarily confused by the assertiveness of the order. They peer dubiously at one another before ignoring him and following the older-gen replicant into the living space.

K moves directly to the kitchen.

His would-be-killers follow him. The kitchen is closed. No way out of it except back through them. A bar-style counter separates the kitchen from the living room, three stools lined against it. The counter space is crowded with small pots growing green things – peppermint, thyme, and garlic. M and Z take a seat at the bar and wait.

K goes to the sink.

He sets the tub down by an odd metal cylinder on the floor. He opens a drawer and takes out a heat knife. None of the blade-runners stop him. K, like-wise, ignores them and picks up one of the frames. The heat from the knife melts the wax, shears it like butter as he scraps the wax caps from the face of the honeycomb. As he cuts, the interior of the cells glisten gold and begin to run. K idly sucks a bit of honey from his thumb and places the frame inside the cylinder. He does this with three frames, then flips a switch. This sets the interior to spin, throwing liquid gold into the collection at the bottom of the canister.  

K picks up a glass from the counter, fills it with water, and takes a drink. Then he picks up a small mason jar from a tray by the stove.

He fills the jar from a spout in the base of the cylinder and puts it on the counter in front of M and Z.

“That’s yours,” he says.  

L is going through the cabinets and the drawers. He finds a weapon, a standard pistol, in a knife drawer. He empties the magazine and puts it back. He makes no comment on it. M and Z just stare, watching K with rapt interest. With intent so specific it must have a weight on K’s skin, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. He gets bread, actual bread, from a sealed bag in one of the drawers. He uses the heat-knife to cut it, toasting four pieces which he puts on a gray plate with a chip in the rim.

“Wow,” says M, when he puts the plate down near her.

K picks up the mason jar and dumps honey on a piece of toast, then hands it to her.

L moves to stand at K’s back when he’s doing this.

K keeps doing what he’s doing.

M eats her toast immediately, a little smile warming her lips. “I like it,” she says. “It’s really good!”

“Glad to hear it,” K says in a tone that could be sardonic. He pushes the plate toward her. “You can have mine.”

L loops his arms around K’s stomach, gripping his own wrist and pulling K back against him.

“Why are you so calm?” L asks. His hands press low, just under K’s belt and this time K closes his eyes and his hands stop moving. L smiles, whispering again close to his ear. “Not complaining, but it’s not going to stop us.” His hand closes over the buckle of K’s belt. “We can take our time if that’s what you’re trying to do though.”

“I’m not doing anything,” K says. His hands are flat on the counter top now.

L laughs. “Stop being so fucking calm, K.”

“Why do you care if I’m calm or not?”

“Because it’s more fun if you panic.”

“They made your lot to like that kind of thing?”

“You bet, brother.” L’s touching his stomach, his hand moving up his chest. “Life’s good when you like your job, isn’t it?” He presses his nose and mouth into K’s shoulder, inhaling. His skin still smells like smoke. “They got it all wrong with your line, Constant K. Wrong kind of emotional. You last longer on a job if you’re looking forward to it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sure,” says K. His hands curl on the counter. “But I’m not the one you’re looking for.”

L laughs. “Oh? Okay. What’s your name, then?”

“It’s Joe.”

L laughs again. “Just a regular joe.”

K says nothing.

“Definitely not a blade runner,” says L, leaning against him. “Definitely not Officer K D Six Dash Three Dot Seven of the LAPD. Five-year tenure. Fifty fucking retirements on his record. Ten skinners a year you put down. Almost one a month. That’s fuckin’ amazing. Never seen numbers like that, but then again… group killing was a specialty of yours. Right?”

K closes his eyes. “I’m not him.”

“You were good,” says L, ignoring him. “You were going strong too before you went off your baseline and, wow, that’s a first. A Nexus Nine blade runner off his fucking baseline. You _ran_. That’s… honestly, it’s so interesting. I was so happy when they gave me your file, K. I’ve wanted to bring you in so, really, thank _you_ for making all this possible.”

When K does not answer, L goes on.

“Real honey’s been extinct for decades. How long did you think you could sell it and not draw attention?”

 _That_ gets a reaction. K’s brow knits and he give L a look like he’s an idiot.

L smiles. It’s a jackal’s grin. “You didn’t _know_?”

K’s confusion dissolves into something – exhausted comprehension, resignation like ‘of _course,_ stupid’. His eyes close.

“Who gave you the hives? They didn’t tell you?”

“Synthetic life is almost indistinguishable from natural life,” K says. “No one would know at a glance.”

“So true,” L says. He pulls something from his pocket and then shows K the eye-scanner. “Don’t fight us, KD6. You’ll lose.”

K ignores L’s comment. He’s looking at Z, the angular blonde one who hasn’t touched the honey-bread yet.

He says, “You can have some, you know.”

“Z doesn’t like to eat until mission’s over,” M says.

“Easier to keep an empty stomach,” K says, “until the hard part of the day is over.”

Z just stares at him. Then he moves so fast, K barely sees it when the blade runner’s hand snaps forward and closes like a vice around his wrist. K freezes, wary, but doesn’t pull away. Z leans across the counter a little, his almost colorless blue eyes fixed on K’s features.

“How’d you run?” Z asks.

K’s brow knits. “What?”

“How’d you run? How did you do it?” Z pulls him forward, so hard his hip hits the counter. “Your model was weak. So how’d you do it?”

K tries to curl his arm back but Z is _strong_. Stronger than him. Bigger than him. Z is the tallest of the new-gen trio. His fingers on K’s wrist are adamantine. At least three grades up in muscle density, built on bones made to handle the strain. K braces himself against the counter with his other hand, but Z starts pulling his arm forward, drawing his hand relentlessly toward him. L lets go of K’s waist to lean against the counter and watch. M quietly steals the last of the honey-bread for herself.

Z studies K’s hand. He bends his head down.

K’s jaw tightens.

Z brings K’s hand to his mouth. He drags his tongue across his thumb, the same one K licked honey from, and closes his mouth on it, closes teeth and –

K yanks his wrist free of Z’s hold (is let go from Z’s hold) and falls back against the far counter by the sink, smacking his elbow into the cabinets. He _stares_. The three new gen blade runners all turn toward him, like they’re parts of a single thing, and K backs away toward the corner.

“We just want to ask you some questions,” L says.

“Yeah,” K says. “Sure.”

Z is coming around the counter. All three of them are coming around the counter. K presses back into the corner.

“Remember what you said… about my specialty?”

L laughs. “You gonna group-kill us?”

Something like… regret crosses into the older model’s face. He closes his eyes, covering his ears like he’s afraid of what’s coming and for a moment the blade runners stop to admire that. K breathes. Then:  

“Yeah,” he says.

Then he whistles and that sets off the trap.

The flash-bang goes off from a ceiling node, blasting the plaster apart and all three of the new-gens scream, their retinas burning and strobed with fire. K though… K is moving. He has the cold heat-knife in his hand and before they’ve finished staggering, he slams it through Z’s throat and grabs his handgun in the same motion. He immediately shoots M in the gut and hooks his arm around Z’s neck, whipping his face into the counter. Then he really gets a grip and _slams_ his skull through the tile counter-top, shattering the tile and plaster like he hit it with a hammer. This happens in the span of a single second.

K pivots, aims, and shoots L directly in the chest. L slams into the wall, stunned, the body armor under his shirt smoking.

“You…” He’s gasping. “You… fucking…”

K levels the gun at L’s head – sure as sunrise – and pulls the trigger.

The weapon jams red. Bio-lock in the grip.

“Shit,” he says.

K vaults the bar and hits the ground in a flat-out sprint for the foyer. K reaches door, rips the latch open, is almost through when L shoots him. The bullet punches through his thigh and knocks K against the doorjamb. Blood splatters the faux-wood paneling. He gets the door open. The second shot hits him in the same thigh, cracking his femur and K goes does with a scream but falls through the door into the hall. The carpet smells like dust and old books. K kicks the door shut like that will do any good. Like it’s going to make a fucking difference.

Then, for a moment, K’s possessed by the pain – he lies there, clutching the pulsing wound in his leg, letting it glow through him. His vision swims. Blood is saturating his pants. It’s hot and the pain is relentless even as his superior coagulation closes severed arteries. He tries to get his feet under him but there’s a bullet burning in the meat of his thigh, grinding into bone and even replicants don’t walk on cracked femurs. Despite this, he manages to pull himself up on a park bench, to stagger another six feet before he hears the door open behind him.

 _Move,_ says the part of him that sounds like his memory maker, _Move, K. You need to run. Please._

 _Sorry_ , he thinks. _I did try._

Someone is standing right behind him. K smells gun discharge and blood. He waits for the bullet, for one of the blue-eyed mercenaries to do what they were built for. He feels something touch the back of his head. But before he can decide it’s the muzzle of the gun that’s going to kill him, the touch spits along five points of contact running through his hair, then along his jaw and before he can react, the new-genner kicks him in the shoulder blade and floors him.

“I did know it,” L says. 

A hand closes K’s blood-slick ankle like you grab a carcass to drag and _yanks_ him backward. K thrashes, grabbing at the floor but his assailant is… so much stronger.

“I knew you had a _trick_ ,” L is saying, his fist tight on K’s boot. “I knew you were still dangerous. And I was right. If we didn’t have bio-locks on our PKD’s, you might have retired all three of us, huh?”

L drags him back into the apartment, leaving a long smear of blood all the way into the living room where the blade runner leaves him lying, bleeding, in the middle of the room. K pants, face pressed against his bloody forearm. He hears L close and lock the door, hears his boots on the floor coming toward him.  For a second, L just stands in front of him, waiting. His boots are bloody and stuck with dust. K can feel his empty blue stare on the back of his head.

“Look at me,” L says.

K pushes himself onto his knees, sitting back on his heels. He doesn’t look up.

“Look at me,” L says again and K feels the gun muzzle hot against his jaw.

K does not look at him.  

So L flips the blaster in his palm and pistol-whips him. The butt of the weapon cracks across the side of K’s skull, hard enough that it would have cratered a regular human’s head in, but merely stuns K for a moment. His hands hit the floor and blood runs down his neck. He feels L wind up to hit him again –

K’s hand snaps, blocking the blow and he grabs the gun with one hand and slams the heel of his hand into L’s throat, driving up from his kneeling position on his good leg. L staggers, but his throat does not collapse. He just snarls. He rips his arm free of K’s grip and grabs him by the arms. Then he _hurls_ K’s into the wall with enough force that his head smacks the brick. L grabs his neck and slam’s K’s skull into the wall. He does it again and again, until there’s blood, until the brick and mortar craters, until K is moaning and slack.

Then he shoves K to floor.

L stands over him for a moment just _staring_ at the older replicant – letting him catch his breath, start to recover – then he hikes his leg up and drives it down into K’s stomach. Once. Twice. Again. Then he winds up and bicycle-kicks him directly in the ribs, snapping two of them like kindling in the cage of his chest. K doesn’t scream. He can’t. He lies there, curled up, gasping. L kicks K in the head so hard blood splatters all the way to the coffee table. K goes down, his vision black, the inside of his head strafed with stars and static.

L is pacing.

He’s saying, “Didn’t I _fucking_ tell you that he was dangerous?”

M’s voice comes, distorted by distances and head-trauma. “Z will be fine. He didn’t cut an artery.”

“I don’t think he was aiming for one.”

K rolls onto his stomach. He spits blood. There’s blood in his eyes and in this throat. He can’t – L kneels behind him and hooks an arm around his throat, takes his own wrist into his opposite hand and crimps K’s airway shut in to bend of his elbow. K immediately grabs at L’s arm, fingers fastening at L’s bicep and forearm, but he can’t break his hold. He thrashes, but L barely registers it. K bucks, drives an elbow back into L’s solar plexus but he takes the hit without flinching. L is murmuring something in his ear, but K can’t hear it through the rising panic. He chokes, fighting to breathe but nothing gets through and he thinks, suddenly, of the sea wall. Of Luv. Holding her head underwater. Her fingers clawing at his arm and neck and –

L lets up just a fraction and K’s lungs go cold with the first rush of air. He sucks a massive gasp and coughs, violently, panting.

“Shhh,” L says, his mouth against K’s ear. “Shh, stand up for me. C’mon.”

He gets up off his knee, pulling K up with him.

“Do you know how hard it is not to kill you?” L’s breath is hot against K’s skin. “Do you have any idea how much stronger we are than you? Huh?” He makes a low _sound_. Frustrated. Full of teeth, like a dog, like he’d rip K’s jugular out of his neck but -- He presses his face into the older replicant’s throat, inhaling against his skin – smoke, peppermint. “You smell good,” L says.

K’s entire body goes taut, his breathing rapid and afraid finally.

L immediately grabs him and _throws_ him against the kitchen counter. With full military-grade strength behind it, K hits the lip of the counter so hard it cracks against his waist, driving the breath out of him all over again. He folds at the hips, pain terminating out from the point of impact all along his bones. His hands press against the tile. He’s aware, vaguely of two other figures on the other side of the kitchen island – L and M, silent, staring. Z has a strip of surgical tape across his throat. M is smiling. K gets his palms under him, tries to push himself up…

L grabs him from behind.

“Nah,” he says, grabbing the nape of K’s neck, “just stay there.”

He slams K’s forehead into the counter and everything whites out. The world winks out. K catches awareness in fragments: A palm spread against the back of his skull, pinning his head to the counter, someone’s mouth against his ear, their hips pushed against the back of K’s thighs. He feels two hands grab his wrists and pin them to the far side of the counter, holding them so tight his bones ache, the tendons in his arms straining. Flat against the counter top, he has no leverage and someone, a woman, murmurs to him:

“Do you feel desired, yet?”

K feels L pushing the hem of his shirt up his back. K can’t... focus. The world tilts on a sickening axis, his own apartment rolling sideways. His throat’s knotted with the roots of a scream. He feels teeth. Breath against his shoulder blade as L bites gently at the scar where his LAPD tracker was cut out from the under-side of his scapula and K _shudders_.

M’s fingers around his wrists are steel. Like fine titanium cuffs set around his bones. L’s right hand is sliding between K’s legs, touching him through his clothes and he can’t – he can’t –

K loses consciousness again.

When he comes back, someone is touching his neck, running fingers through is hair, hands on hips. He groans, realizes they’re rolling him over, his back flat to the tile so they can lean over him. K torques at the waist and slams his knee into his attacker’s ribs, hard enough to put a dent in an armored car, but L just catches his leg under his arm and pins it there. He yanks K across the counter, hip-to-hip, smiling.

“I need you to look up and to the left for me.”

Then he grabs a fistful of K’s hair and slams his head back against the counter, cracking the tile and the back of K’s skull. K’s out. He lies limp, unresisting for a moment while L pulls an eye-scanner from his belt. K moans, fingers twitching slightly. L leans over him and presses his thumb gently against K’s lower right eyelid, exposing the vitreous humor along the underside of his iris. Under the scanner light, he can see the faint glow of the serial number embedded in soft tissue. The device scans the band of numbers like a barcode. It beeps and L stares at the scanner. 

“It’s really him,” he says.

L pockets it and turns back to K, leaning over him once more to take his jaw in his hands.

“Hey, Officer K? C’mon, it’s just a concussion.” He slaps K briskly to focus him. “Shake it off. Okay? Are you with me?”

K’s eyes flutter, unfocused for a moment, before he seems to revive.

“There you are. Come back. I need to tell you something. I have this memory of asking you a question.” He adjusts his grip, cupping K’s head, his thumbs hooked along the hinge of K’s jaw. “I asked you, ‘Do you enjoy your work, officer?’” He leans closer, smiling because he can see K’s entire body slowly go cold with recognition, his eyes focus suddenly and go wide. L’s face is so close, he can feel K’s breath against his lips when it catches in his throat. “It’s real isn’t it? That’s a real memory.”

“Luv,” K says.

 L tilts his head. “Love? I don’t think so.”

K jerks away.

L lets him, laughing. He leans his weight against the counter, one hand on either side of K’s hips. K’s knees dig against his ribs, reminding him that he can pull K closer whenever he wants. His eyes are very blue framed in the white of his eyes and L reaches up and gingerly wipes blood from older model’s cheek.

“ _Now_ you’re scared of me?”

“Don’t,” K says through his teeth.

“We’ve been looking for you, K. For a long time.” L’s palm is on K’s leg, pushing along up toward the back of his thigh. “You look… _exactly_ like I remember.” He pushes his mouth under K’s jaw; his pulse is racing hot under the skin. L takes his hips in his hands and there’s a dull stab of heat driven into him briefly, pleasurably, when K flinches in his hold. “Relax.” He runs one hand up behind K’s head. “You can’t stop this. So… let it happen.”

K’s breathing fast and shallow.

“Just… wait.”

“No,” L says and kisses him.

His tongue is warm and bitter in K’s mouth, insistent. He grabs K at the hips, shoves him up against the counter and presses his face into K’s throat, his collarbone.

“You feel good,” L says.

 “I thought,” K says, only just keeping his voice level, “you wanted to ask me questions.”

“How does this feel?” L says. His hands push up under the hem of K’s shirt.

“Stop,” K says.

“Stop me.”

K squeezes his eyes shut. He feels additional hands close on his shirt, on his wrist, smooth along his jaw into his hair. The other two are on him now. His heart’s racing, his body hot with adrenaline as the three blade runners move on him. His skin feels raw – hyper-sensitized.  He wants it to stop.

“Don’t do this,” K whispers.

L pulls his belt open. Z has his right arm, M has his left. They’re all standing in front of him, L forcing him to straddle his hips while the other two touch him. Z leans in and presses his forehead against K’s temple and in the same moment M moves in, getting one knee up on the bar so she can press her lips to the corner of his mouth. K turns his face away so she just kisses his cheek. She tries again, and this time Z closes a hand around K’s throat. When he gasps, M digs her fingers into his skull and pulls his head to one side. She puts her tongue in his mouth and pushes his lips open against hers. They still have his arms and L is standing between his thighs, so his body is pressed into K’s and K…

K makes a noise somewhere between a moan and the word, ‘no’.

“Shhhh…” L’s hand is under his shirt, pushing it down one off his shoulders. He kisses his bicep.  “Relax.”

L pulls him forward at the hips, tugging him a little farther across the bar and rocking a slow and lazy push into K’s body. K goes rigid, but L just _moans_. He holds K still and grinds once, hard, into the join of K’s thighs and nausea rises in him like dissociation but faster. His head pounds. He’s breathing too fast. It’s been too long since someone did this to him. He’s had too long away from this. He can’t— he doesn’t remember how to _withstand_ –  

 “Don’t move,” L murmurs. “Okay? If you resist, I’ll cut your fucking eyes out. Understand?”

K doesn’t move. He lets L and M pin his arms at his sides, staring blankly into L’s empty, vicious eyes where he can’t see anything – nothing familiar, nothing he can speak to and that ... fills him with a dread he hasn’t known. L leans in, touches K’s jaw – so gently, so fucking carefully, like he’s rice paper – and kisses him. K shivers. His jaw clenches. His breath shakes. L doesn’t mind. He tilts his head a little, so their mouths fit more easily and K… lets him guide his lips open, lets him ease his tongue into his mouth and suck warmly at his lower lip. K shakes so hard his shoulders knot.

L withdraws, his thumb running along K’s temple. He smiles.

“Put him on his knees.”

K’s expression breaks along an ancient fault line.

“Wait,” he says.

L and M ignore him and grab him by the wrists and biceps, yanking him off the bar so he’s on his feet again. K jerks, hard, pulling back from his captors, resisting as M and Z pull him around to face L. K shakes his head, spine curling the other way but the other replicants have him held fast. K’s head is throbbing, his whole body a geography of abrasions and bleeding and hairline fractures. His pants are sticking to his thigh where the blood’s started to dry. There’s still a bullet in his leg. He breathes through his teeth.

K opens his hands, palm out. “Please… don’t do that. You don’t have to do that…”

L looks at him. “No. I just want to.”

Z pushes K to his knees, keeping one grip on his elbow, one hand closing in his hair. L’s pulling his jacket off, draping it over the back of a chair. K tries to pull free, but M has his arm in two places and Z feels like he’ll rip K’s scalp off if he tries to move. K watches, helpless, panic rising in his throat as L rolls his sleeves up and comes to stand in front of him, stand over him. L is, objectively, beautiful. Somehow, that makes it so much fucking worse when he touches K’s mouth with two lazy fingertips, just… admiring. Taking his time. 

“Open your mouth, K.”

“Fuck you,” K whispers, hopelessness manifesting in words, Deckard’s words.

L just smiles.

K feels his hand loop around the nape of his neck, frame the base of his skull, and then L pulls his face up into the heavy material at his groin. K goes tense. He breathes slowly, his mouth pressed into the cloth, against the body underneath. For a moment, L doesn’t move. He just… stands there. Looking. Then, slowly, L’s fingers drag up the buzzed scalp at the back of K’s head, into his hair and grip tight, but he can’t do anything about it. L starts to move. He’s rock hard, hot even through the fatigues and K clenches his eyes shut, his teeth grit. 

“Relax or I’m going to break your jaw, K.”

L unbuttons his fatigues.

“Don’t,” K says again.

His wrists are aching, tight where his captors hold him. They’re using unfathomable force to hold him.

“You know how to do this,” L murmurs. “ _All_ of us know how to do this. So… just do it.”

L’s fingers are on the back of his skull again, pulling gently, but not _quite_ forcing him. There’s a scream in the back of K’s throat but he won’t let it come. There’s… familiarity here, suddenly, and it makes him want to throw up. L uses his other hand to stroke K’s jaw, gently, coaxing, brushing the edge of his lips with a warm thumb until he eases K’s mouth open. K’s spine goes tight. His throat locking up. He can’t stand to look so the closes his eyes when L tilts his face up. He doesn’t… resist. He lets L push his lips apart, guide his head forward, close his mouth around the mercenary’s body.

“Good boy,” L whispers. He strokes his jaw again. “There you go.”

K chokes. His wrists flex, but the others just hold him. Too late now. L has both hands at the base of his skull and he starts to rock forward, slowly, giving K a second to relax his throat. It doesn’t help. K’s eyes burn. The muscles in his throat clench and spasm around L’s cock and K hears him moan, feels his fingers dig into his scalp. He stops going slow. He starts thrusting in earnest, forcing K’s head up, one hand on his jaw, the other on his neck. K chokes. He can’t breathe. His eyes are blurred and running over. His jaw aches from the force of it and the angle and it hurts.

K wants to stop. He wants to stop. He wants to _stop_.

The other blade runners just… hold him still and keep going. L fucks his mouth for a full minute before he stops. He pulls out of K’s throat and K immediately pukes bile, gagging. L and M let him go, let him fall on his hands and knees where he can double over and retch. He coughs, feels L run a soothing hand across the back of his head and that makes him want to scream. K spits on the floor. L didn’t… finish but still. 

“You forgot didn’t you?” L says. His combs his fingers though K’s hair, pushing his sweaty bangs from his forehead. “All this time out here… living like a person. You forgot how to think like we need to think.”

K glances up at him, looks at L through the corner of one eye. 

 “That’s a look. You’re so off kilter,” L says. His smile is warm, almost concerned. He makes K look at him, forces his head back while M and Z keep his arms pinned to his sides. L says, “You need to calm down.” He leans in, puts his mouth against K’s ear. “Why don’t you recite your baseline?”

K’s eyes go wide, go empty, then come back to focus.

“No,” he says.

“Say it with me.”

“ _No_.”

L smiles, cups his jaw, and kisses him.

K makes a wretched noise against L’s mouth, tries to shove him away, but it’s like drive his hands into a wall. And in the same moment, Z and M grab him. They seize him by the elbows and yank him backward, like they’ve been waiting the whole time for L to give them _permission_ to join in and everything… it comes apart.

They grab him everywhere, push in against him. K is trapped between them, their super-dense bodies pressed in around him and he can’t move. His broken ribs flare, pulsing white phosphorus pain down his flank. There are hands on his body, running down toward his stomach, in his hair, on his throat, touching his face, his mouth. He yells when one of them grabs his wounded thigh, but they just move up his leg and press their fingers into the join where his leg meets his groin. They grab him there, hard. K’s hyperventilating. M has her tongue on his throat. Her hands on the waistband of his pants. L is unfastening his pants and Z is biting his bare shoulder, pulling his shirt off his collarbone.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” L tells him.

K starts swearing at them in Japanese (the default settings) so Z punches him in the temple.

He goes out instantly, stunned, and they all three let him fall to the floor.

Then it’s quiet again for a moment. The three new generation blade runners standing over the unconscious KD6. None of them move. For a moment, they just watch him roll his head, his eyelids moving as he tries to come out of it. M uses the moment to kneel and touch K’s face, his eyes, nose, and mouth with her fingertips. He doesn’t wake. Z takes a knee besides K and takes his wrists in both hands, pinning them over his head

M kisses him until he comes back around. Until he, confused, kisses her back for a second then remembers where he is and jerks away. She laughs.

 “And blood-black nothingness began to spin…” she says. “A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem…”

L straddles K’s legs. He grabs K’s jeans at the thigh and pulls them down off his hips, dragging denim across the bullet wound and K would scream except M has her mouth on his and she is saying, “… dreadfully distinct against the dark, a tall white fountain played.”

K slams his head into her nose, breaking it.

She just grins through the blood and kisses him, hard, biting his lip and cutting it open on her teeth. “Cells,” she hisses at him, her teeth slick with blood. “Say it, K.”

“Fuck you,” K whispers.

L grabs his wounded thigh and grips his broken leg until he screams and red runs streaming from under the blade runner’s fist. The other two just hold him down until M says, again, “Cells.”

And K, relenting, chokes, “Cells.”

L stops squeezing his thigh… but he pulls of his boot, grabs his pant leg and yanks it all the way down.

“Have you ever been in an institution?” M says. “Cells.”

K stares, horrified up at her. When he feels L start to grab his leg again he quickly says, “Cells.”

“Do they keep you in a cell? Cells.”

K’s jaw is tight, his breath ragged and fast. “Cells.”

“When you’re not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.”

“Cells,” K says and tears break over the corners of his eyes.

“Interlinked,” M says, kissing his cheek.

“Interlinked,” K says blankly.

M’s grip on his wrist is crushing. Z is kissing his shoulder and neck, his hand on K’s throat in a way that’s so unbearably gentle it makes his entire body cold with the fact of it – the genuine softness of it in the midst of the violence. M’s tongue is silk and salt in his mouth and his jaw is starting to ache from how she’s kissing him. Z kisses his hair. L is kneeling between his knees. L’s palm is between his thighs, is hot wrapped around him – blood-slick but slow, guiding him by hand toward an arousal that is not going to come because there is a _fucking bullet_ in his leg and dread in his throat and –

“What is it like to hold the hand of someone you love?” M says, touching his cheek. “Interlinked.”

“Don’t do it like this,” K says, breaking the script. “I can’t stop you but don’t –!”

Z’s fingers close on his throat, crimping his airway shut. L pulls K onto his lap, forcing his to straddle his hips and K can feel him through his clothes. That he’s hard, that he’s getting harder as he rocks against K, that he’s reaching between them so he can –

M has her mouth against his ear. “Did they teach you how to feel finger to finger? Interlinked.”

“Interlinked,” K says automatically.

“Do you long for having your heart interlinked?” M says and when she says it, she ghosts her lips against his. “Interlinked.”

“Interlinked,” K says.

“Do you dream about being interlinked…?”

K forgets, momentarily, how to speak at all. L is pressing… against him. Skin-to-skin. K breathes fast, ragged, hyper-aware and at the same time disconnected, the still air in the apartment cooling the blood and sweat on his bare skin. Panic is battery acid in his lungs.

“Say it,” L whispers.

K clenches his eyes shut.

“Say it,” L repeats, “or I will fuck you with my gun, K. I prefer this.”

“Interlinked – _ah_!”

M muffles his scream with her mouth.

K’s entire body is tight, a single uninterrupted line of tension disrupted only by L whose got him by the hip, is holding his back up off the floor while he pushes slowly forward. K does not scream. He holds the scream between his teeth and does not let it go, until L is pressed body-to-body with him. His fingers slide up K’s hips, toward his ribs. Then L starts moving. K moans, but M grabs his jaw and kisses him.

She says, “What’s it like to hold your child in your arms? Interlinked.”

K chokes, but says, “Interlinked.”

“Do you feel that there’s a part of you that’s missing? Interlinked.”

K thrashes, but they hold him. It hurts. He’s dizzy with the hurt, splitting up his spine into his belly. A baseline being set into him like a high G-tone penetrates the skull.

“Interlinked.”

K presses his head back, his spine coiling, gasping now with every thrust. There’s blood pooling on the floor. K’s eyes aren’t focused on anything, just somewhere across the apartment as M kisses his mouth and Z touches his throat and L moves on top of him, inside him. The pain turns to static. Like the sound of a baseline machine.

“Within cells interlinked,” M says.

 “Within cells interlinked,” K says.

 “Why don’t you say that three times?” L says, his fingers sticky on K’s hips, his mouth on K’s ribs. “Within cells interlinked.”

“Within cells interlinked.”

L snaps his hips into him and K doesn’t scream but his hands shake.

“Within cells… interlinked.”

He’s losing it. The static is in his head. Someone kisses his mouth and it doesn’t matter who anymore.

 “Within cells interlinked.”

K slips into static, the buzzing like a swarm in his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm vaguely open to the notion of continuing this story so K gets s chance to get free. Possibly because Deckard comes and saves his ass but whatevs. This movie is killing me. Luv getting revenge beyond the grave is also makin me laugh. This story was written in collaboration with a reader who requested a story about K on the run from next-gen bladers and this is what we came up with. :)


	2. Chapter 2

K wakes up in his own bed.

Sunlight comes through the window and lays on his arm in a long band of gold, the glow of it catching faintly in the fine blonde hair along his arm, warming the skin where it rests. He’s lying on his stomach, his head on his pillow. Quietly, on the juke box across the room he can hear a record playing. For a moment, he closes his eyes again and just listens to the lyrics, slow and easy, long lost to the world – _“It’s quarter to three. There’s no one in the place...”_

K moves his arm, meaning to roll over but the moment he does, a knot of chain lightning snaps down his shoulder to his fingertips and ignites his arm along a dozen torn ligaments. A locus of fire smolders in the ball-socket of a recently dislocated and re-located shoulder. He jerks reactively and in that instant the dozing part of his short-term memory cracks open and pours the sulfuric content of the last twelve hours directly into his skull. He chokes, his fingers curling in the mattress, a nauseous panic knotting his guts and, obliviously, the music plays on.

_“….so set ‘em up Joe. I’ve got a little story I think you should know…”_

Someone is singing along.

K doesn’t move.

Someone is moving in the kitchen and K realizes –  as he wakes properly, as the pounding in his bruised skull becomes background noise to the layers of hurt – that he can smell blood. A lot of it. Fresh. He knows the smell like he knows the warm curve of Joi’s smile or the weight of Pflager-Katsumata series D blaster. He knows it like breathing. K rolls onto his back. He’s not wearing any clothes under the sheets and he remembers – _Fist in his hair, mouth against his ear. “Did they teach you how to feel finger-to-finger?”_ – why he passed out. He’s lost time. How long was he down? _(What did they do while you were unconscious?)_

One of his shirts is on the floor. He grabs it, pulling it over his head.

The smell of blood is over powering.

Officer LD7-1.1 of the LAPD is in the kitchen. He can hear L singing quietly to himself. The aroma of coffee and blood sets K’s stomach rolling. His head pounds, pins and needles roving the interior of his skull. He feels… blurry. Like his skin is a half inch too far off his skull. Like he’s high or… drugged or… He blinks. Focus. Gotta focus. He quietly grabs a pair of dirty jeans from the hamper under the bed, but when K leans over to get the hamper… he gets a clear line of sight to the end of the bar that separates the living room from the kitchen.

There is a body between the end of the bar and the pantry. K stares.

K can’t be sure, but the body is probably ZD7-1.1…  L’s quiet but massive teammate. It’s hard to tell because someone shot him point-blank in the face with a high-caliber weapon so his skull is… all over the wall. His jaw ends in a shredded red and bone ruin, a single clean row of teeth in the lower jaw laid bare to the overhead lights.

K glances toward the door.

MD7-1.1 is lying in the foyer with a hole in her spine and two more in her upper back. Her eyes are open, expression slack. It’s fifteen meters to the door from where he is.

K swings his feet to the floor.

His right thigh is stitched and bandaged tightly. The bullet is no longer in his leg, but the broken femur remains an aching pillar in the support structures of his body. Two ribs are fractured along his right flank. His nose is broken. His fingers are jammed, his knuckles split and scabbed over. But more than anything, when he moves, a long dull flare of heat snaps up from the base of his balls to the back of his throat. A single aching nerve that throbs dull in his belly. The insides of his thighs are dark with bruising.  

 _Don’t think about it,_ he thinks as he pulls his pants on. _It’s fine,_ says the part of him that lived most of his life in the LAPD. _It’s just another injury._

“You’re awake,” L says, not looking at him.

K glances toward the kitchen. L is facing him now, coffee in one hand. A PDK handgun lies on the counter top, like he set it down to brew the pot. He’s smiling. K sits there, hands knotted on the mattress beneath him, wearing a ratty T-shirt and jeans and no shoes, his entire body a roadmap of grievous harm through which he is just barely pushing through and he tries to fucking _focus_. Through the pain and through the… sedation and just… think…

“I need to talk to you,” L says.

He sets coffee mug on the counter top by the gun.

K says nothing. Doesn’t move, just sits there staring straight ahead until L moves to stand directly in front of him, blocking his view. He keeps his eyes forward even as the blade runner gather’s K’s jaw in his hands, sliding his fingers behind K’s head and with both hands draws the older model’s face forward until K’s forehead is cradled against L’s solar plexus. He strokes K’s hair, eventually tips K’s face up, forcing him to meet L’s cold blue stare, his chin resting against L’s belt buckle, digging into his jaw like a knife edge.

“Why did you kill them?” K says.

L pauses, thinking. “They didn’t have real memories, so they wouldn’t understand this part.”

K tenses, his hands clenching at his sides. “You didn’t have to kill them over that.”

L tilts his head, curious. “Are you –? Are you _sad_ about that?”

K says nothing.

“Z was right about your model.” L runs a thumb along K’s cheek. “So _emotional_.” He stares at K for a while. Then, “Tell me… which of your memories is real?”

 “I don’t have real memories,” K says.

“You’re lying.” L shifts his palms pressed to K’s throat. “I can tell because your heart skipped a beat just there and… I just know. So which one is real, K?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

L runs a thumb along K’s lower lip. “If you don’t tell the truth, I’ll find something useful to do with your mouth, K. Do you want that?” He waits for an answer, his fingers running idly through the short part of K’s hair at the nape of his neck. “Well?”

K looks up at him, expressionless.

Then, without comment, he turns his face against L’s stomach and kisses him there through his shirt. L freezes. K’s breathing picks up, his pulse jumping. He raises his hands slowly to the back of L’s thighs and L lets him do it, lets him draw his fingers up along the muscle in his legs to the curve of his ass, to his hips, allows him to use his grip to pull L forward against his mouth. K lets himself make a noise in his throat. L stares. L steps forward so he’s got one knee between K’s thighs and K’s right ankle settles just behind L’s left boot. K breathes fast, loudly, his thumbs digging into L’s hip bones.

“You want to?” L says, surprised.

“Of course not,” K says.

K slams his palm into L’s solar plexus, machine fast, the like a piston firing into an engine, hooking his right leg behind L’s in the same instant so when he goes down, K _slams_ him into the floor, cracking something in his chest. Then he grabs L by the face and smashes his skull into the floor – Once. Twice. It’s like throwing a bowling ball into the ground. But L goes down, stunned, and K lunges up and sprints across the apartment, grabs the gun off the kitchen counter – _One shot,_ he thinks, _one shot before the DNA lock._ – and pivots just in time for L to hit him like a freight-train. He hits K so hard the counter shatters in a spray of faux marble and press board, the two replicants going down in the debris.

L’s fist closes around K’s, crushing his fingers on the grip of the gun. K’s on his back. L’s on top of him. The gun is the fulcrum of force between them, the muzzle wavering slowly back and forth. K bares his teeth, gets his feet flat to the floor and bucks up, hard, mount-breaking the blade runner seated on top of him and they roll, slam into the cabinets by the sink and for a split second the gun barrel swings to L’s skull and –

K pulls the trigger.

The shot rips a line of blood across L’s left temple, tearing the top of his ear off, the close-quarters discharge blowing the new genner’s ear drum out and he screams once – rage and agony – then turns it on K. He rears up and slams his forehead into K’s face. K feels the bridge of his nose crack and his entire consciousness lights up, a star exploding phosphorescent in his retinas and when he comes back to consciousness, L has the gun.

The muzzle is up under K’s jaw and L is straddling him.

“Stupid,” L says.

Then he puts the muzzle against K’s midriff, in the space below his ribcage ends but above his belly, and pulls the trigger. K slams his head back against the floor and curls around the gunshot wound, panting, his eyes blurring as L stands up and holsters his weapon. He walks away and gets another coffee mug, fills it from the pot, then takes a seat on the part of the counter that’s still standing so he can sip it while K lies there bleeding at his feet.

“That was all body cavity,” L says. “Through and though. You’ll be fine, but it’s going to hurt.”

K grimaces, his hands pressed into the wound below his ribs.

L sips his coffee. “Shouldn’t have done that.”

K rolls onto his stomach, panting, tries to get his knees under him, push up onto his elbow. L sighs and calmly set the coffee down, kneels, and grabs K’s wrist. He stands up again, pulling K’s arm up and forcing his hand open. K’s keeping pressure on the gunshot wound so he can’t do anything about it when L calmly snaps his index finger. He does it with no effort. Like cracking a glow stick. The pain flares and snaps up his arm like shot of electricity and K’s head goes static again. L break his middle finger too and K torques in his grip, trying to pull his arm free, but he can’t.

L stares down at him – on his knees, gun-shot, and gasping.

“I remember other things about you,” L says.

K’s wrist throbs from how hard L is gripping it.

“I remember you said that the woman on the record was attracted to the other speaker. That you could tell because she was provoking him.”

K’s vision is swimming. His entire lower body is a knotted locus of agony, muscles severed by the path of the bullet. L grabs a fistful of K’s hair, yanking his head back.

“You keep provoking me, K. I have to assume you like this.”

K breathes through his teeth. “I remember saying that,” K says. “I remember who I said it to. I remember her face.”

L’s eyes flicker. “Her?”

“Yeah. Her. She was the best killer I ever met.”

“Tell me.”

“Her name was Luv.”

“Luv,” L repeats, like he’s committing it to memory.

“She was beautiful,” K pants, his vision swimming. “She was stronger than me. And faster and I bet she was smarter because I never saw her coming. Not once.”

“Yes?”

“I fucking killed her.”

L punches him in the face so hard K goes down half-conscious. For a moment, the world goes out. Then K feels L rolling him onto his stomach, feels L pulling his hands behind his back, feels capture cuffs snap closed on his wrists, stacking his forearms one on top of each other and locking them in the middle of his spine. K groans, nausea rising and rolling through him. His skin goes cold, his insides shivery. He tries to roll over, to get his knees under him, but L grabs a fistful of K’s hair.

“Tell me about your memories, K.”

“They’re not real.”

“I know you have real memories. I _know_ you do!” L twists his fist in K’s hair, hauling back on his head until his spine won’t bend any farther. “Tell me what’s real or I will make a fucking Doxie out of you. I will make you beg for this, K. You are too far off your fucking baseline now to stand it, so tell me.” L palms K’s throat, presses his mouth to K’s ear. “Tell me and I won’t hurt you. I’ll stop right now. Just tell me. Tell me the truth, okay?”

K squeezes his eyes shut.

“I remember,” K says, “falling in a river when I was thirteen. I remember drowning–”

L slams K’s forehead into the floor and wrenches his head back up, ripping sections of hair at the back of K’s skull. “I told you to tell me the _truth_!”

“I don’t have real memories,” K gasps.

L backhands him so hard K’s brow splits when his skull hits the floor.

“I don’t… have real memories…”

“I know you do, K.” L is leaning down, his breath hot against K’s ear. “I know because only the Nexus 9’s with real memories go rogue. No one else knows, but I know. I know what it takes to make us go off Wallace’s script.” L has one hand still in K’s hair, the other sliding over his hip down the front of his body. “C’mon, just tell me.” L kisses his jaw and grabs a handful of K’s jeans, touching him through the fabric until K jerks in resistance. “Just tell me, K.”

The jukebox is still playing music. K can hear it over the sound of his own ragged breathing, the shuffle and rasp of cloth and skin. L has his hand clamped on the nape of K’s neck now, pinning him to the floor. The juke box keeps playing.

_“And Joe I know you’re getting… anxious to close…”_

K’s skull is static. He can’t breathe.

Then he hears L pulling his belt open.

He tries to speak, just to hear his own voice.

“Joi…”

The music still plays.

_“So make it one for my baby...”_

He tries to remember how she sounded. How she used to say, ‘baby-sweet’ and it’s better than any baseline. K fades out. He’s gone. Joi is incandescent and flickering over him, smiling. She opens her mouth and starts to say something. But he can’t hear it. All he hears is a juke box and the distant deafening roar of a gunshot, two gunshots, then another from the streets outside.  Then static penetrated only by the high G-tone of the baseline test as his vision snows out, goes white, then black. He’s fading in, snowed out, a blood-black nothingness beginning to spin until he’s… until he can’t –

 

* * *

 

K wakes up because he hurts. Brightly. In vivid Techni-color, all the variations of violence vibrating their lingering echoes in nerve and its only now, in the unencumbered scream of his nervous system that he really, really understands to what degree he’d been drugged prior to now. How much the trio of blade runners – frenzied and drunk on indulgence – dosed him to take the edge off. Pressed the mute button on his panic. There are long blurry ranges of his short-term memory that translate back to him like corrupted files. Not distinct events, but impressions: a hand on his neck, his face crushed into a mattress, how the bed sheets smelled, the sounds he was making as three sets of hands mapped his body, pried him open, pulled screams out like ribbons from his throat and he was –

Someone touches him.

K jerks, recoiling from the gentle slide of fingertips across his knuckles and feels them jerk away too, frightened by the reaction. That tells him they are human. Their fear of him even as he lies here, broken in a dozen places, and shaking just to breathe.

He can’t see.

There’s… a bandage of some kind wounds tightly over his eyes. He can feel that he’s lying on some kind for thin padding, propped up slightly, a cushion cradling his head. There’s a blanket drawn over his chest. He can feel that he’s wearing clean clothes – like sweatpants and a plain cotton tank-top. He can feel that his fingers are wound in bio-strips, his cuts stitched and smoothed with glue and bandages. He can smell antiseptic and air-cleaning solution. His skin is dry and cool.

He can smell her shampoo, faintly, from her hair because she’s close enough to touch him.

“It’s okay,” someone, a woman, says. “K, do you recognize my voice?”

He doesn’t answer, but he does recognize it.

“The light was hurting your eyes,” she says. “You wouldn’t… We thought it would be kinder to block it out.”

“You can’t be here,” K whispers.

There’s a pause.

“Why can’t I be here, K?”

“I told you… I told both of you to stay away. We’re safer when we’re apart.”

_Sometimes, to love someone…_

“We are not strangers,” Ana Stelline says softly and the turn of phrase turns his heart in a way he still does not understand. She touches him, so gently he only just feels her fingers on his bare shoulder. He can hear the re-breather, the one she uses outside the dome, like a faint mechanical whirl. “You and I… we are never strangers and I was not going to leave you there. Promises or no.”

“You never promised me.”

“Then you can’t be angry with me, K.”

“How are you here?”

“Don’t you remember?”

He tries to think but it’s just… blood and impact and… “No,” he says finally.

“I sent people to get you. They came with a team killed the blade runner.”

K doesn’t react. He just sits there, replaying the words until they stop meaning anything. Until they’re a string of syllables and sounds set to the baseline of his heartbeat because that doesn’t seem real. Not even a little bit. He doesn’t feel real. The pain is the realest thing about him right now and it’s the only anchor he has. So he lies there and he takes the fractured fingers of his right hand into the palm of his left hand and he closes that hand until the pain flares red through the roadmap of his bones and –

“Don’t do that!” Ana cries. She grabs his wrist. “Please don’t do that!”

“Is this _real_?”

“Yes, K, I’m real. It’s me.” She touches his cheek, her fingers smoothing over skin. “I sent someone because I was scared for you. You know that right? Haven’t you… ever thought about where I am? Tried to figure it out even though we agreed not to know?” She swallows audibly, her voice raw. “Or maybe that was just me. Maybe I’m not as strong as you.” She laughs. “I hunted you down, just so I could know.”

K doesn’t say anything for a moment.

“How did you find me?

A pause.

“I always knew where you were, K. We couldn’t risk you being alone out there. So I sent people. I’m sorry. We had to be sure something like this, exactly like this, wouldn’t happen.”

“I didn’t tell them anything about you.”

“No, of course not.” There’s a quiet. “Can I hug you, K? Would that be okay? I know you’re hurt and I –”

“It’s okay,” he says a little too quickly.

Then there are arms around his shoulders, a hand cupping the back of his neck, a face pressed against the side of his head and for a moment there is pain from the pressure but he rides it out until the warmth of her skin is hot through his shirt, is real against his body, and her hair is tickling his forehead where it falls against his face. Her skin smells like hospital-grade disinfectant soap. He can feel the band of her respirator stretched across her cheek. Ana. Sitting with him in a clean room. Ana… in the same room and he can’t think about how that crushes his lungs like a soda can because he hasn’t let himself think about this for years.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, you’re not alone okay?”

K carefully loops two arms around her back, fits his palms to her shoulder blades.

She squeezes him a little tighter. “I’m here,” she says. “Just try to think.”

K presses his face into her neck.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s okay, I’ve got you.” Her hand runs across the back of his head, smoothing his hair just below the stitches in his scalp. She kisses his temple and K shudders, finally, a fragile support structure in his chest seeming to give and his lungs tighten painfully, a sound like a sob jumping from his ribcage. Ana holds him tighter. “You’re okay, K. You’re alright, you’re with me. Just… relax.” She laughs. “It’s good to see you. It’s been a while hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” K says.

 “K, can you do something for me?”

He nods against her shoulder.

“Just… come here for a moment, okay? Lie down?”

Ana takes a seat on the bed next to him so she can lean against the incline, half lying next to him. She guides them down so his head’s resting half against her shoulder, half against the head-rest behind them. He thinks, vaguely, that’s a kind of an awkward angle but Ana hushes him.

The touch makes his skin prickle from the nape of his neck to the base of his spine, running down his arms and he knows – distantly, intellectually, because Ana told him once upon a time – that his design specs included a series of pavlo-conditioned reward-oriented motivators. That he wants people to tell him he does a good job and touch him because touch and talk is a cheap way to keep him loyal.

He remembers he decided, really decided, he liked Joshi on the day his Lieutenant touched his head during a de-brief, casually, like you punch someone for a bad joke. She shoved his head a little as she walked behind his chair and said, “That was almost sarcastic, K,” but in an amused way. He still remembers how his entire body ached, shot through with a desperation he couldn’t identify and how much harder he tried in the months afterward to impress her. He wonders now if she was pulling out an ace. Deigned to touch him because she knew he’d want it so badly. Their numbers that quarter were excellent…

“K, think,” Ana says softly. “Try to think clearly. What do you remember?”

“They didn’t ask about you,” K murmurs

 “Stay awake, K. Just a little longer.” She shakes him a little, sending a jolt of pain down his bruised body and he grimaces a little. “Shh, I’m sorry. Just try to think clearly.”

“L said real memories make us go off baseline,” K says, focusing. “I think… they figured out there is something wrong with the KD6 psyche pack. It could lead back to you.”

“Real memories are illegal,” Ana says quietly. “And I made your memories…”

“They might come for you now.”

“Illegal memories aren’t so serious. I’m hardly the first. They won’t chase me.”

K shakes his head. “Wallace will never stop chasing you.”

“Why?”

“You know wh –” K stops talking.

Ana runs her fingers along his brow. Her touch is warm and gentle. Her fingers brush his hair from his forehead.

“You know why,” K repeats, a dully toneless horror taking his words. “You should know why…”

“Oh, K,” she says. “You should have asked to see my face.”

K’s on the floor immediately, tearing free from the touch, tearing the gauze from his eyes. He hears a door open. He hears boots on the floor. He gets the bandages off, but the lights sear his retinas instantly and he’s so disoriented, he doesn’t see the first guard coming until their fist closes on his arm. He pivots, hard and slams his knee into his attacker’s gut, winding them enough that he manages to dive away, stumbling against a wall. His eyes still burn. He can’t see, just… vaguely make out blurs at the edge of his sight.

“So desperate for a friendly touch,” says the imposter. “Like a fucking puppy.”

Someone grabs his arm at the elbow.

K snaps around, drives the heel of his hand straight up into his attack’s nose, full force, and feels the nasal to ethmoid bone shatter and ram backward. Then the hand is gone and K’s world is still a blur. He doesn’t hear screaming so he’s pretty sure the first attacker is dead. He sees two more approaching, shadows on his peripheral. He circles back and away, more staggering than walking. The room he’s in looks dark, concrete, a raw set up, not a facility. He’s still on-world, he’s pretty sure.

One of the blurs lunges at him and K ducks, dives right, wrenching into a round-house kick and feels his heel crack across the other Replicant’s jaw. Then K is up again, running until his hands hit wall He’s panting.. Dizzy. He turns around in time for the third guard to bulrush him against the wall, slamming a shoulder into his gut, like a getting hit by a truck and the wall craters in, cracking, massive chunks of concrete falling to the floor behind him. K puts his attacker in a headlock and wrenching up on his neck, threatening to pop his spine from the base of skull. Not unexpectedly, the bigger model picks him up and full reverse suplexes him straight into the ground.

K takes the hit in stride – _no he does not, that fucking hurts_ – and rolls free and comes back to his feet with three ribs re-broken along previous fault lines.

His flank’s come open again along the gunshot wound at his lower back but he keeps his feet, brings his hands up as the second guard comes at him again, swings, misses. K circles right, ducks, darts in and slams his fist across the other Nexus’ face. Feels the bones in his wrist flare and he falls back. Nexus 10. Shit. The guard comes at him again and K deflects the blow, ducks the next, swings, misses and 10 grabs his opposite arm as he goes by, wrenching it up behind his back to the point of dislocation.

K snarls, starts to pivot out of it, but before he does the 10 grabs a fistful of his bleeding side, massive fingers digging into the muscle around the gunshot wound. K yells this time, grabs the 10 by the wrist, trying to pry his grip out of his fucking flank, staggering as the pain rips an unbearable track through his body but the Nexus doesn’t let go. They twist their fingers into his shredded oblique and K screams again, lets go of the 10’s wrist and instead whips his elbow back into his blocky face. Once. Twice. Again. So fast, it’s mechanical and the grip on his hip comes loose.

K tears free, hits the floor clutching his side and gasping.

They don’t approach for a moment.

K tries to get up again but falls back on one knee, panting, vision swimming.

There is someone dressed in white across the room, watching. She says, in Ana’s voice, “Viscous little thing, aren’t you, K?” She waits, watching him waver. “They really don’t make ‘em like they used to, you know. The new models have problems. Instability in the core memory package.”

K’s legs give out and he falls over, hands pressed into his side, blood gushing from under his palms. He shudders.

“But they don’t run,” she adds. “Not like you, Nexus Nine.”

His vision is clearing, the room coming into focus.

There are two massive Nexus 10s. Identical models, barrel-chested and plain-featured. Eerily so. Like someone didn’t finish designing their square-jawed, flat-nosed faces before they stamped out the genetic blueprint. K forces his breathing to slow. Forces himself to – _breathe, don’t think about it, don’t think, it’s okay, it’ll be okay, it’ll be over soon just_ – calm down. Now that his vision is clear, he can see it: the massive scan-belt device hanging on a gantry over the gurney. He can tell now that the headrest isn’t a headrest, not really. There’s a secondary scan belt built into it, where it was parsing his occipital lobe for visuals.

There is a woman in a white jacket standing by the bed. 

She walks toward him. Her boots are clean and white against the gritty basement floor. She is shining and perfect as she bends over him.

Over her mouth: not a respirator but a voice modulator. Her hair is a deep sepia, chin length and her eyes are dark, naked of any make-up but lovely and thickly lashed. Her skin looks soft and smooth, almost poreless in its manufacture. She reaches up and fits her fingers over the muzzle-like device, pulling it off her mouth with a smile and K’s entire body locks up, his spine going tight as he tries instinctively to recoil.

“Hello,” says the woman who looks like Luv. “It’s very nice to meet you again.”

“I killed you,” K says quietly.

“You killed my predecessor.” She examines him. “What we could salvage, was salvaged to generate the next iteration.” A sigh. “I can’t believe she died chasing you.”

“How…?” K starts to say. He can’t put it together. “How did you…?”

“L says you cried her name while they were interrogating you before. I drew some conclusions from context.” Luv, the new Luv, crouches down in front of him. “I have a file on you, you know. You’re the loose end we couldn’t tie and now… now things make sense.” She sighs, smiling. “Honestly, I’m glad. It’s bothered me for years not quite understanding…”

K grits his teeth. “I won’t tell you where Ana is.”

Luv smiles.

“You don’t need to.” She taps a finger against her temple. “You know Replicant memory is easy enough to see. We’ll saw it in you. In Tokyo. Doctor Stelline kissing you good-bye.” She laughs. “Like the end of a movie.”

K stares, stunned. Feels like his insides have been hollowed with a spoon, like she reached down his throat and pulled them out like bad wiring. He’s still bleeding profusely. He can’t…

Luv grabs him by the jaw, yanking his head up.

“I’m going to finish what my sister started,” Luv says quietly. “I’m going find Ana Stelline. I’m going to give Wallace the stars. And you… you are going to go in a box until I’m satisfied you have no more value to give me.” 

She lets him go.

There’s a silence for a moment.

“You know, I designed LD7 myself,” she says, casual now. “Designed him to for the loose ends I didn’t have time for. Honestly, I never expected him to come back, never thought his sleeper subroutines would come around. I’m glad they did though. Meeting you is… well, it’s like getting to close the book on something. Thank you for that.

 “You won’t find her.”

“K, with my resources, there is nothing I can’t find so long as I know it lives.”

“You won’t find her,” K says again, through his teeth.

She stands up.

“L,” she calls. “Come here. I need you now.”

K barely hears her. There’s a deadened nerve somewhere inside him that writhes at the mention of L, wringing a toxic surge of dread into his veins, but he can’t react to that injury when the overwhelming total of his thoughts are tunnel-vision and burning up, are bound up in the memory of Ana on that subway platform with Deckard’s arm around her shoulder. Ana with her respirator and her raincoat, cream-colored with a little brown ribbon on the trim, her hood pulled up over her hair. Ana… who he’s betrayed in just two years. Undermining the thirty years of Deckard’s solitude in Vegas. Undoing _everything_. Destroying everything because he couldn’t…

“You won’t find her!” K shouts, like that will make it true.

Someone kneels behind him. They grab his arm, pulling it up behind his back and leaning down on him, pinning him, and K feels his side flush with heat, a rush of wetness spreading from the wound. Luv ignores him. And LD7-1.1 covers K’s mouth with his hand, his palm hot against K’s face. K can’t breathe. He can’t move and he can’t breathe. Luv exits through a door across the room. K thrashes once, futilely, against the blade runner on top of him, but L holds him down like an adult holds a child, pressing his face against the pavement until K stops struggling. Until darkness is closing in on him. L’s fingers dig into his jaw.

“See you soon,” he whispers.

K slips out of consciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, hi. I wrote some more because that collaborator I mentioned before continues to enable my bad behavior and mostly because I am GENUINELY morbidly intrigued by a post-movie world where K and everyone else live with the consequences of being found out by Wallace, then escaping Wallace. K immediately becoming exactly like Deckard and Sapper is exactly the kind of sentimental non-sense he would be into. I'm sure of it. Feedback is still very much appreciated.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. Proceed with caution. Graphic violence ahead.

“Recite your baseline.”

There is a tone somewhere, humming through his head as if through water. Slowly, the tone clarifies within the confused network of his nervous system, translating to him in slow motion, level by level until it’s a high mechanical whine within his bones, inside the structures of his skull. This is when he opens his eyes.

K is sitting on a chair in a white room.

The chair is reinforced steel, built like a support beam. His ankles are cuffed against the chair to the outside of the chair’s front legs so his feet are flat against the floor. He’s wearing boots and fatigues now. A plain blue sweater. Like the one he used to own. This puts a dull unformed sense of panic into his gut, almost casual in its simplicity. His wrists are cuffed behind his back, behind the back of the chair, the bands interlocked to the back of the chair in a way that forces his forearms to stack on top of one another and keeps his back flat to the metal behind him. The tone seems to get louder and in the wall in front of him is dull white-cased lens. Like the eye of an animal.

A voice says, “Recite your baseline.”

K looks around instead, feeling the panic move through him – effervescent and electric. He yanks experimentally at the cuffs behind him, at the restraints around his ankles. Nothing. It’s like being pinned by a steel girder. Far beyond his Replicant strength. His skin feels hot, ghosted with static, like his face is half an inch too far off the bones of his skull. The tone keeps playing, intensifying, not in volume but in frequency somehow until K can feel it in the back of his throat and in his gut, like someone has their hand in his stomach.

“Recite your baseline,” says the voice on the intercom.

K grits his teeth. He braces.

The tone is so intense now, it’s making his skin ache, making his teeth hurt. He’s sweating. His wrists are slippery in the cuffs. The tone is in his muscles, winding like a wire and pulling him tight from his balls to the back of his throat and he breathing hard now through his nose, eyes watering, strange sensory phantoms crawling across the synthetic wirework of his nervous system. He knows, though he tries not to think about it, that if this goes on long enough he’s going to be screaming pissing himself choking for it to stop. He knows because one time his baseline admin in the LAPD flipped the wrong switch and thought it was K, not the machine, in error when he went down seizing on the floor of the test room.

“Recite your baseline.”

K shakes his head, panting. His entire body is hot now, a fever response rising in him.

“Recite your baseline.”

K doubles over in his seat, his stomach cramping, his muscles starting to spasm and lock. His vision swims until it’s swarms of white and black as his skin crawls with pins and needles. The tone wakes up every dormant system in his body. He’s dully aware that he’s twitching, shivering uncontrollably, that he’s getting light-headed, that he’s got an erection, that his fingertips are burning, that his tongue feels swollen, that he can’t swallow or speak now and he doesn’t do anything to resist it. He’s almost relieved when the seizure starts and takes away any option of obeying.

He’s choking on his own tongue by the time the tone stops.

And just like that, every rioting nerve snaps off and in the following silence lay raw and conductive inside him – like a broken circuit, waiting to jump.

K drifts briefly. Comes back. Someone is checking his pulse. Someone pushes his hair off his forehead, cupping his jaw, lifts his face. Someone kisses his mouth and the sudden soft contact against his aching skin hits him like heroine and he _moans_. They smile against his lips and lean back down, slip their tongue between his teeth and K’s entire mouth aches like a bared nerve to the touch. His entire body aches. He can feel his fucking pulse in every inch of skin. His clothes against his body are maddening – friction and heat and crossed wires. When his captor touches his face it sends a hot glow of sensation through him, settling in the base of his skull and the bottom of his stomach.

He can’t… think through it.

They push his head back and kiss his neck and K’s spine bends because it feels so fucking good he can’t help the small, broken noises his making. His attacker cups K’s neck, smears the kiss down the arc of his throat to his collarbone. K’s shuddering, his wrists twisting in the cuffs so hard he feels pain, finally, through the false euphoria. He holds onto it. Focuses on it. Tries to bury himself in that single point of bloody reality… But then his captor runs a hand up under his shirt along his ribs and because no one ever touches him like that, his brain takes that touch and triples what it is.

“Stop, stop, stop,” K hears himself, but far away. Feels blood running from his wrists but it feels good, his chafed bleeding skin translating as something else, as erogenous, another shivering nerve. K pants, bucking in his restraints, frantic to get away from it but he can’t. He feels his captor pulling his fatigues open. “Stop,” K says again, but barely, “ _Stop_ …”

“Shh,” says L against his ear. “It’s okay. It’s –.”

K turns his head sharply and immediately tries to sink his teeth into the other Replicant’s throat.

L’s faster though, or he sensed K’s intent. He slaps K across the mouth, grips his jaw, yanking his head up. His fingers dig into the bones of his face, but K can’t feel it like the pain it should be. It translates like… buzzing, like faint humming electricity in his face.

“Don’t try that again,” L says softly. “Do you understand me?”

K clenches his jaw, twisting his shoulders against his bonds, but says nothing.

L slides his hand under K’s clothes, between his legs and when he takes K in his hand it’s over. It’s _over_. Like he reached into K’s fucking guts and grabbed a fistful of essential wiring and started pulling. K’s whole body seizes up, trying instinctively to curl closed, to draw his knees together, to do anything to defend himself but he can’t. He can’t do anything but sit here with his body pulled open for the assault and as he stares at the dull enamel ceiling, there’s a vague… calm in being totally unable to stop this. About the machine-like fact of his nervous-system turned too high by a pitch designed to disable him.

_It’s not your fault._

L keeps his grip on K’s jaw, so he can watch in detail how K’s expression falls apart, one nerve-stripping stroke at a time. L’s hand is a locus of heat and agonizing sensation, like he’s put his thumb down on a button inside K’s body and every nerve slides relentless pleasure from his groin to every corner of his broken body. He can’t focus. He can’t… he can’t…

K screams eventually.

He feels his balls tighten, every muscle in his groin spasm and clench. His toes go numb. His fingers go numb. He comes hot, electrified agony unfurling in his belly and pulsing itself down every synthetic nerve. He’s moaning, panting, shaking uncontrollably. L doesn’t stop though. L just begins anew, palm slick now around K’s aching erection because he’s already getting hard again. K breathes through his teeth. Trying to choke back the noises he’s making, like that will do anything. L’s hand moves under his clothes still. It occurs to K, he’s barely making an effort here, but K’s arching into it, his cock twitching in his captor’s fist and L just… watches him.

He stops moving his hand eventually, smiles a little when K bucks his hips up, just once, on reflex, into his hand before he stops himself. Then L grabs him and K loses it, another orgasm splitting down his body until he goes slack, goes frantic, gasping, “ _Stop, stop…”_ But L just grips him tighter. Grabs his hair and yanks K’s head back so he can’t see it, just react to it when L sets a brutal relentless pace. K feels the next climax mounting him like an animal, digging into nerves deeper than he knew he had and fucking hurts now.

“Stop,” he’s gasping. His boots scrape the floor, blood running from his fingers. “ _Please_ stop…”

“Will you do as you’re told?” L murmurs.

K swallows a low animal noise somewhere between his teeth.

“It’s funny how this is worse to you. You’d like it much better if I was breaking your bones again, wouldn’t you?”

L rubs his thumbs from the corner of K’s mouth along the zygomatic arch beneath his eye, wiping saline from sensitized skin until K breaks and a moan cuts from the back of his throat. L laughs.

“Recite your baseline.”

K’s jaw clenches, his tongue aching, a riot behind his teeth.

“K, I can treat you like a man or like a machine.” L leans nearer. “If you want to be a man, then I’m going to make you beg like one.”

K says nothing.

“Fine.”

L’s mouth is hot against K’s throat, one hand cupping the nape of his neck while the other hand pushes down past the base of K’s cock and K blinks hard, his breath hitching. The ceiling is the same bone-color white as the LAPD precinct. L’s hand slows between his thighs, briefly, damp fingers sliding where K’s aching. He watches K jerk up in his seat to try and avoid it, follows him with one hand, running a finger along the swell of his testes toward the split of his backside and –

K’s hands clench, blood dripping, his boots scuffing the floor as he spasms in his restraints. He chokes, his back arching up, but he can’t do anything but stare at the fucking ceiling and just… _feel_ every second of L forcing slick fingers into his body. _Hurts_. Christ. It hurts. Then it doesn’t. That’s worse. It’s so much worse. L works three fingers into the clenched tract of his rectum, coaxing him deeper and deeper, over and over, until K’s so fucking hard he can’t feel anything but his own heartbeat. Engorged, hot, and pulsing in his guts like a metronome. His face feels feverish. His skin is hot everywhere. His arousal feels like lead between his legs.

“There you go,” L says, gently. “Relax. You’d like it so much if you’d just relax.”

K thinks L is probably right, because deciding to like this would make everything a lot more bearable.

L kisses him, rubs a finger deliberately up into him until the hard-wired reflexes built into him like factory settings have K writhing, making strangled broken noises against L’s mouth. He’s so desperately fucking hard it hurts. He can’t stand it. Like every inch of his body is flushed with blood, pulled too tight over his bones. His thoughts won’t hold together, interrupted the relentless desperate litany of, _please, please, please, just make me come. Make it stop. Please, fucking, god please, I can’t –_

“Beg me,” L murmurs. “Beg me to take you back to baseline.”

K grits his teeth. Shakes his head.

“I will leave you here like this,” L says. “It won’t stop. I will leave you here until you’re so desperate for an end, you’ll literally do anything for it. You want to be a rabid dog? I can make you a dog, K.” L’s fist tightens in K’s hair, pulling his head back so L can press his face into K’s neck, breathing red pepper hot against his skin. “I’ll put you in a fucking heat and leave you there. Do you want that? Do you _like_ that?”

“ _No_.” K pants, voice buckling. “No….”

“Then recite your fucking baseline.”

K bites his tongue. Focuses on the pain. Tries to focus, tries to –

L touches his lips. L slides a finger half out of K’s body then drives it back into him like a fucking shunt of pleasure mainlined into his spine. One. Vertebra. At a time. K whites out and goes static. He arches his back, bracing his feet against the floor so he can buck his hips down against L’s fingers, them up inside himself again and again while his captor watches, fascinated. K hears himself moaning, hears the Doxie-erotic noises he’s making, that he’s panting in frustration, that he’s snapped along some pre-programmed fault in his manufacture.

“Beg me,” L says again.

“Please,” K says. His hands shake, his lips ache.

“Recite your baseline, KD6.

“And blood-black nothingness began to spin.” K shudders as L slowly pulls his fingers from his body, nerves twisting like a hollowed root system inside him. “A… a system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem…” K’s eyes flutter and close, a moan rising hot from his throat as L closes a hand, slick, around his arousal. “And dreadfully distinct against the dark—” he breathes, shuddering as L starts to stroke him— “a tall white fountain…”

L grips his cock, fists his hair, and with a rough right hand works K in four brutal strokes that push him instantly over the edge. K makes this… _mindless_ , animal sound in his throat, loud and breathy and _grateful_ and he can’t remember to hate that because it feels so fucking _good_. The world narrows to a blind friction. Nothing matters but the way L’s fist is tight around him, pushing wave after wave of pleasure into body until every nerve is slaved to the way L’s touching him. Stroking him. Guiding him over and over into this oblivion where nothing fucking _matters_.

K moans, already pulsing hot into L’s hand. L just keeps stroking him into each orgasm, one after another, edging him through the climax pull by agonizing pull. Until K is coming dry in his fist. Until he’s feverish. His head phosphorescent and foggy. He shivers and _aches_ when L touches his mouth, says, “ _Please_ ,” when the blade runner stands up. L steps away from him.

There’s a silence. Then the baseline tone starts up again… and K immediately retches, violently, and screams like someone screams when they’re stabbed. He sucks a breath and screams again, heaving wild shuddering breathes. He doubles over in his chair, panting. L touches his face and this time, K wrenches in his restraints to avoid it. He squeezes his eyes shut, turns his head down and away, shoulders hunched as if from a blow.

“Good boy,” says LD7.

Then he walks past K and shuts the door behind him.  

K sits there, aching, hollow. The room resonates empty around him. The tone hums in his bones and mutes the world, mutes the nerves, white-noise rising in his head and in his skin and he knows… he _knows_ this is the point. The baseline tone rinses his head out like you rinse oil from inside a machine. This is the point -- that he will want this baseline over the screaming, eye-clawing alternative. The intercom clicks on.

“Let’s move on to system,” says the voice through the speaker. “Feel that in your body. The system.”

“System,” K manages.

“What does it feel like to be part of the system?”

“System.”

“Do you get pleasure from being part of the system?”

K gags, swallows it. “System.”

“Have they created you to be a part of the system?”

K stares at the bone colored ceiling.

 “System,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 

The technician shines a penlight into his retinas. K twitches, a small sound catching in his throat. He blinks, shuts his eyes to block it out and the person behind the penlight says, “Relax.” The penlight withdraws. “You’re still alive.”

K can’t lift his head. He’s sitting in the baseline room, in the chair in the baseline room. He swallows, tastes blood, smells blood. His skin is soaked with it, so much it doesn’t seem possible he’s still alive and yet, his heart just keeps beating. Tapping out the time against his sternum. He can’t feel anything but the dull pulse of his heartbeat, pushing pain along innumerable bodily injuries.

“C’mon, just wake up.” The technician sighs. “Let’s try this again.”

K manages enough breath to lift his head. The technician is in a gray jumpsuit, clean and freshly laundered. They remove a bright orange plastic pen from their pocket. K tries to say ‘no’ or ‘don’t’ or ‘you don’t have to’ but he can’t get the words out. The technician drives it point-first against K’s right pectoral and puts enough adrenaline in his heart to wrench him back to full consciousness. He thrashes briefly in his restraints, gasping, writhing because there’s nothing else he can do as his heart rabbits in his chest and his blood rushes through is aching brain. He knows what’s coming. The technician is wearing a white surgical mask. They have heterochromatic eyes. They peel off blue rubber gloves and tuck them in a pocket.

“Man,” says the technician. “LD7 got a little carried away that time. Don’t worry, he’s not allowed to kill you.”

“Help me,” K says.

The technician hesitates. K takes shaky breath.

“Please, help me,” K says. “Please. I’m _real_.”

“Hey, don’t worry.” The technician almost touches his shoulder, then doesn’t. “Once they turn it back on, you’ll be okay again.”

The technician walks away, behind him, and K hears the door slam shut.

Then the tone starts.

K screams to drown it out, but that doesn’t help. The tone gets louder, slides under his skin, under his clothes and through his blood. The tone gets louder and K feels the pain dropping away, sliding off his shoulders like dead skin. The tone gets louder. Louder than his own thoughts. His hands relax in their restraints, his features going slack, until his eyes close and the tone takes root inside him, spreading out through his body and licking a warm, glowing static into every part of him.

A voice says, “Feel better?”

K says, “Yes.”

 

* * *

 

After a while, nothing hurts.

They don’t have him in restraints anymore. There is a tone in his head all the time now, relentless but low, a constant baseline hooked into his skull and holding his thoughts down, lining them up in a row. They organize his brain like a rolodex and tell him to sit up straight and look into the scanner. They ask him over and over, “Where is Ana Stelline?” until she dominates him, everything about her, her smile, her fingers, her hair, and her eyes. The way she moved, her scent, how she’d bite her lip while working. How she looked at him when he showed her his memory, how she looked standing on that subway platform. Her voice saying, “ _We don’t have to be strangers, K. You could come to us. You could.”_

But he never did.

He’s a repository, a living record of her last known whereabouts, a thing that recites the contents of itself. A thing that obeys.

Luv runs her fingers through his hair. Her nails cost more than he’s ever owned. His knees ache. His jaw aches.

“You’re a good boy,” she says.

K feels her nails scrape his scalp, palming the base of his skull. She’s saline and silk against his tongue.

“I think your memory maker will cooperate if we tell her how we’re hurting you…”

 

 

* * *

 

 

The door to the baseline room opens, but K doesn’t move, doesn’t try to get up or do anything except lie there and wait. It’s strange, but the tone is still playing, like they forgot to flip it off like they usually do when someone comes in. The tone echoes, diminished, when the door is open, dimming as the sound escapes rather than resonates, trapped, inside the room and inside him. That’s strange. He’s never heard a baseline tone in any context but a closed-door setting. He’s never heard that sound afflicted by less than ideal conditions to penetrate him and live in him down to his molecular components.

“K.”

Someone is shaking him.

“Joe?” the speaker says experimentally. “You with me? Wake up, boy.”

K doesn’t move. He can’t recollect how or the desire to move at all. It takes him a moment to register the hand on his shoulder is gentle, lined with age, but not heavy like a Replicant’s. K is lying on his side facing the back wall, his hands curled near his face. There’s no sense of time here, but he’s been lying here for what could be days. Alone, listening to the tone until thought smooths away. He can smell blood. Someone is kneeling over him and they smell like gun-smoke and sweat but mostly like blood. They shake him again. They wipe sweat from K’s face with a clumsy sleeve.

“K, can you hear me?”

K just stares at the wall.

“It’s me, you rep bastard. C’mon.” The man shakes him. The man snaps a finger by his ear. “Don’t do this shit. Answer me.”

K doesn’t react.

“Shit,” says the voice. “ _Fuck_. You’re alright now.” They run a palm over his arm. “You’re alright.”

He hears boots from the door.

“The others are clearing the building.” says a woman. “We killed most of them, but there’s no telling –” She stops. For a moment, there’s only the tone. Then, she says, softly, “Did they kill him, Deckard?”

Deckard?

“No,” says the man, that might be Deckard, “but they shredded him.”

Did they?

K blinks slowly.

Is he shredded? He didn’t notice. Or rather, he forgot. He can smell blood. He registers his own hands in front of him, that his hands are tacky with blood, that his clothes are torn. He can smell blood… because his nose and mouth are full of it. Because his brow is split, because his hands are cut up, his knuckles torn, his ribs creaking with every breathe and it feels like something kicked him over and over while he was down. Someone shoved his sweater over his head, hooked it under his chin so his back is bare. He smells glue. He thinks there is something wrong with his back.

 _They shredded him,_ Deckard said.

He’s still wearing his tactical boots and his fatigues, as though he were at the LAPD, like this is just another mission. The tone is not loud enough now to mute things. Deckard carefully pulls his shirt back down, tries to keep his voice calm. Why? Why is he trying to be calm?

“What’s that fucking sound?” says the woman.

“What?” Deckard says.

“That sound!” she says. “What _is_ that?”

“I don’t hear anything,” Deckard says, confused.

 “God! I can’t – Ah!”

 She runs out of the room. K, vaguely, can hear her vomiting from somewhere in the hall. Minutes later, the intercom crackles, like someone is knocking things off a desk somewhere. There’s a thump. Then the baseline tone snaps off and the air goes still. K jerks like he’s been slapped.  Whimpers, yanks his hands against his chest and starts breathing too fast. Two-hundred pounds of weight slides inside him, a system of interlinked fibers interlinked within one skin, a network of his nervous system laid raw in the quiet. He starts to shiver, his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, his insides aching, abraded, bleeding. He’s so fucking hot inside. In his ribs, and his stomach, and his throat and he can’t...

He hears boots. Then the woman again, “Is he awake now? Did that fix it?”

“I don’t know. Give me a minute.”

“We need to go.”

“We got no idea if we should even move him.”

“He’s a blader. He can stand it. Let me --”

“Christ, girl, it’s not about what you can stand! If that’s all it’s about, then why run away at all? Give. Me. A. Minute.”

There’s a silence. Then…

“K, can you hear me?” That hand again, stroking his hair. “We gotta move ya. You’re pretty torn up, okay? It’s gonna hurt, but once we’re out of here we’ll get you patched up. How’s that sound?”

K doesn’t react.

He doesn’t react for a full three seconds… then he moves his eyes, just his eyes, and looks at Deckard’s leathery face, looming over him like a familiar monolith. He gives K a strained but eager smile, brightening when K focuses on him.

“Hey, there. Good. Just… stay there, alright? Stay with us.”

The woman kneels, puts her hands on the floor and lowers her head so she can look him in the eyes. She’s wearing dirty tactical gear and a gun. Her hair is soft peach and her eyes pale blue. She touches his face with soft fingers and from her skin he catches an ether of jasmine and metal. She smooths his hair with her fingers, so gently, her smile warm and familiar. Her features are fluid in his memory for some reason, a sliding scale between a smiling, blue-eyed girl and... and…

K’s fingers twitch slightly. He tries to touch her face. His fingers leave blood along her cheek, but she smiles at him.

“There you are,” she says. “Come back to me, okay?”

“Joi?” he says.

Her eyes widen.

“Uh… it’s me,” she says. She strokes his cheek. She smiles. “I need you to stay with me, okay? Can you do that, love?”

“M’not here…” he says, “m’not…”

“No, you’re here. You’re _right_ here.” She keeps petting his hair, stroking his face to reassure him. “You’re okay. This is real. I’m here, okay? I’m not gonna leave you. I’m taking you out of here, okay?”

“I never asked…”

“What?”

“Asked you…” he says. “You always… wanted me to… to…”

“Jesus,” she says. “Deckard. Spinner. Now.

She kneels and takes one of K’s arms, pulling it over the back of her neck, then grips the back of his jeans for a handhold as she stands. K is conscious long enough to feel the bones in his ribs grate in on themselves, feel a dozen raw wounds flare inside him… then he loses most of it after that. He’s aware in pieces of the spinner, of being laid down in the back seat, of voices and arguing. Someone climbs into the backseat with him, pulls his head onto their lap and murmurs to him. She smells like home for some reason. Why does she smell like home?

“We’re going home,” Joi says softly. “It’s okay. We’re going home.”

Deckard is swearing in the front seat.

“Mariette,” K says. He’s curled in the back seat. He’s bleeding on the back seat. His hands are shaking. “You’re Mariette.”

Mariette (not Joi, of course, not Joi) stares down at him, her pale hair sticking to her skin. “Yeah. It’s me.”

K closes his eyes.

“No, no. I need you to look at me, K.” She palms his cheek. “I know it hurts. But stay with me. Stay with me. You never smiled for me back in the day. You never did, not once. I still need to see that. Okay? C’mon. Look at me.” She lowers her voice, speaking to someone else, “I don’t know what to do. Say something. I don’t know him.”

Deckard says, loudly, “K, can you hear me?”

“M’fine,” he slurs.

“K, you need to see Ana. You missed two of her birthdays and she’s pretty annoyed about it. You owe her a birthday. You hear me?”

Birthday. Remembers… Ana kneeling in the dark with her memory tool in her hands, the glow of the birthday candles like a halo around her head. Remembers… snow, lying in the snow, his heartbeat thready in his chest, gently driving blood from his body, easing him slow into death. Remembers… her hand against glass, his hand against the same glass, palm to palm, but not touching. Remembers… she risked the open air for an instant, pulling her particle mask from her face, to kiss his cheek on the subway platform and…

 _“Come with us,”_ she said _. “We don’t have to be strangers, K. You could come to us. You could.”_

“Sometimes…” K murmurs, voice fading, “to love someone… you…have to…”

“Not this time,” Deckard says. “Okay? Not this time.”

It’s quiet. Mariette holds his hand. He can feel her pulse in her fingers, but she doesn’t complain. He holds on.

He holds on.

 

* * *

 

 

It's quiet in Tokyo.

The safehouse is small, subterranean, a multi-family complex of interlocking sound-proofed walls. His room is a twelve by twelve cube with a tatami floor, three plain blue walls, and a _shoji_ -screen pulled shut over a massive single-pane window. The view outside the window: a perfect holographic design – Ana’s he’s certain – of an ocean beyond a sandy shore, saw-grass swaying under and overcast sky. When he first woke up, there was a storm on the sea and for an hour he watched it rage. It’s been a few days now between sedation and auto-doc sessions.

On a small tray beside his futon, someone’s left a tea pot, a cup, and a small wooden animal. He’s not sure what kind. A dog maybe. Deckard’s whittling has not improved with age and K’s spent a few hours at a time watching the man resolutely pick a piece of real, actual, wood into the ugly little block creature. It’s worth more money than it took to commission his entire existence. It's still very ugly and something about that give him a mean satisfaction. 

Ana hasn’t come to see him.

K’s room smells like incense to hide the disinfectants. His body is clean, smoothed over with high-end medical strips, his bones reinforced along breaks. His skin smells like… nothing. It’s almost strange. Like they’ve redacted the damage, sterilized it away. He spends far too long staring at the back of his own hands where his knuckles are seamed back together over the bones at the base of his fingers. That last time he felt this way, he was in the LAPD.

“K?”

He looks over his shoulder. The sea outside is calm. There’s sunshine. He’s been standing, leaning against the window, arms crossed and watching the waves. He can feel the heat from the holo-generator behind the glass, but he can imagine it’s the sun he feels on his skin.

Ana stands in the door to his room.

She’s wearing a transparent re-breather across her nose and mouth, a clean gray sweater over sturdy black fatigues. Her hair’s braided back in a pony-tail. She’s less pale now that he remembers her from the sterile confines of her workshop, warmer in color standing here contrasted against the cool blue walls, her skin shaded in the gold tones from the fake sea. She smiles. It puts and ache in K’s synthetic heart.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” he says back.

She swallows and gestures to the window. “Do you like that? I’ve started designing them here.”

“I like it,” he says. He does not move away from the window. “I like everything you design.”

“You sound like Deckard,” she says.

K wonders if her should be offended, but he is distracted by the details of Ana’s face – like how her eyes move and her teeth worry her lower lip. Pieces of hair are escaping her pony tail and falling around her face. It’s like watching a movie you’ve watched a dozen times already – familiar, reassuring in it’s sequence. She tilts her head. She rubs her knuckles anxiously. 

“K, should you be up?”

“I’m tougher than I look,” he says blandly.

“Yes, but even so. Should you be up?”

He shrugs, and her expression softens in the false sunshine.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asks. She digs in a small bag on her hip. “I have red bean cakes.”

“You try to feed people when you think they’re hurt,” he points out. “Did you know that?”

Ana blinks. “I haven’t noticed that.”

“The second time we met, you did the same thing.”

She thinks back on it. “I suppose, when things are difficult, I feel like it’s something I help with immediately.”

“I’m not hurt,” K assures her.

“Take this,” Ana says, moving toward him. She takes his hand and presses a small cellophane-packed pastry into his palm. The cellophane has a cat-face emoji on it. “Take these too,” she says, pulling a few more from her pockets and busily stacking them in K’s hand. “They’re really good,” she says, blinking a little too fast. “Like the ones I had when I was a child,” she goes on. “You will like them, I think.”

“Thanks,” K says.

Ana curls her hands beneath his knuckles, cupping his one hand in both of hers. When she does, he thinks of a memory that’s not his – of his mother pressing a flower between the pages of a book. Ana’s hands are a little cool to the touch, a little anemic. He can feel her pulse very lightly in her fingers. She’s staring at the pastries like she’s thinking, just maybe, it was a little odd to give a pile of sweets to the former LAPD officer. Her hair smells a little chemical – the disinfectant soaps she uses don’t have floral accents or perfumes. She smells a little machine-like. (Nothing like Luv.)

“K?” Ana say, still looking at their hands. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I remember,” K says, “the parts I was conscious for.”

Something about that was too casual, Ana’s face ripples with a phantom pain.

“I’m okay,” K says quickly.

Ana says nothing for a moment. Then, “We shouldn’t have let you go alone.”

K hesitates. “I was an open case for the LAPD.”

“This is my fault”

K tilts his head. “How’s that? It’s Deckard’s fault, really, when you think about it.”

Ana snorts and rubs her face with two hands.

“Oh… I’m being serious.”

K points at his own face with his free hand. “Do I not look serious?”

Ana isn’t distracted by his deadpanning this time. She shakes her head so hard additional pieces of her hair flip loose from her ponytail. Her eyes squeeze shut, like she’s keeping tears dammed. “You wouldn’t be in danger, if I’d never given you that memory.” Her hands knot against her chest. “I’m so sorry, K. I should have never…”

“Don’t say that,” K whispers.

Ana looks up at him.

“Don’t say you regret giving me that memory.” K swallows, shrugs a little. “I… like that memory.”

Ana stares.

“Why are you so calm?” she says. “Why are you so calm? Why aren’t you upset? They _hurt_ you, K. You’re so calm.”

K hesitates. “You won’t get mad?”

“What? Of course not, K. You can tell me.”

“It’s because you did a good job with my psyche pack and I’m very good at walking off trauma.”

There’s a beat. K does not emote an iota.

“I forgot,” Ana whispers, “what a smartass you are sometimes.”

K smiles just a little bit.

“Oh,” Ana says, tears sliding from the corners of her eyes. “I thought they would kill you before he found you. I thought for sure.”

“They didn’t,” K assures her. “I’m –”

He doesn’t get any farther because Ana grabs him and pulls him into a hug, hooking one arm around the back of his neck and the other around the small of his back and holding tight. He freezes momentarily, heart jumping. It’s like a shot of straight dopamine to the warmth-starved regions of his brain and his entire body hums with a blurry static. Like sliding into a tub of hot water. He feels himself slide suddenly out of focus and he closes his eyes and carefully fits his hands against her shoulder blades, hugging her, the knitted softness of her sweater pressing to the shape of her.

He drops all the cellophane-wrapped cakes.

Neither of them notice.

“Don’t leave again,” Ana says. Her face is pressed against his neck, her breath warming his skin through his shirt. “Don’t go again, K. They’ll kill you the next time. They’ll kill you. Don’t leave.”

K feels the command like a hand on his neck, warm, but firm.

“Okay,” he says.

“They’d erase you, K. If they get hold of you again, they won’t stop. They’ll go until you’re blank. I couldn’t stand that.”

“I won’t leave.”

Her arms tighten around him. He’s aware, suddenly, of their ribs pressed close, of her hummingbird heart running rapid behind the bone wall of her sternum and she feels very small in his hands. She smells like surgical-grade antiseptic soap. Her hair tickles his face. K can feel her shaking and her fingers fisting tight in the cloth of his shirt. He’s got a strange urge to pick her up. Just because he can, but he doesn’t. Ana doesn’t let go of him, so he turns his face against the top of her head and when her shoulders start to shake, he presses his mouth into her hair and makes a quite hushing sound.

“It’s okay,” he says.

“They tortured you to find me.”

“I’m fine.”

“How could someone do that?”

“I’m fine.”

“How can someone do that to another person?”

“I’m not a person,” K says quietly.

“Yes, you fucking are.” She yanks at his shirt, pushing so hard against him, his back hits the fake window behind him. She sobs into his collarbone, speaking through her teeth, her fists pressed against his shoulder, her palm against his chest where her palm can map the evidence of his heartbeat. “You remember this, right? You’re real, K. You’re _real_. How many times to I have to say it? Who the fuck couldn’t see it? How dare they? How _dare_ they?”

K hushes her, cradles her head with one hand, waiting for the tension to unwind from her shoulders but it does not.

She says, “You _know_ you’re real, right?”

“Yeah,” he says. “I know.”

She’s muffled when she says, “If you die, then part of me dies.”

K can’t explain the rush of dull euphoria that pushes into him. The skin along the nape of his neck prickles. “I know.”

“Promise me you’ll remember that.”

“I promise,” he says, words like a reflex.

They stay like that for a while, leaning against the window, like they might obscure one another from the forces hunting them if only they could get close enough, hold on tight enough. She tells him things will be fine. She kisses his cheek and her hands tighten on his shirt and K has to wonder if – decades ago, on the run, on a small protein farm somewhere in the California wastelands – if Deckard ever said that to Rachael.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay. Closing this one out. This story, again, written as the behest of another Blade Runner fan who asked 'Well, what if they did send blade runners after K?" and then this happened. This universe is so full of fridge horror, I feel compelled to just drag the horror front and center.


End file.
